Don Lemon has signed a three-year hosting and advertising deal with Libsyn for his podcast and affiliated shows.
Per the agreement, Libsyn will host and monetize Lemon’s flagship audio and video podcast, The Don Lemon Show, as well as his companion shows, Lemon Live at 5, Hot Topics and Lemon Drop. With the deal in place, Lemon wants to soon bring more shows, hosted by other creators, into the network, with topics outside of politics, and broaden distribution to online platforms such as MSN or on FAST channels.
The new deal should help bring in more ad infrastructure to the company, as his staff of four contends with a growing audience, Lemon said. The former CNN anchor brought The Don Lemon Show to YouTube and audio in 2024 as an independent creator. Elon Musk canceled the planned debut of the show on X, shortly after he was interviewed for the podcast.
The YouTube channel now has 1.41 million subscribers and Lemon said the company is making money through the mix of subscriptions, sponsorship deals and advertising, with Lemon also taking on speaking engagements and penning a daily newsletter on Substack. Lemon also airs several of his shows live, and allows paid members to call in to some of his shows.
“People are tuning in, or subscribing, or watching us because they trust us, because they have become disenchanted with corporate media, and so we have that,” Lemon told The Hollywood Reporter.
He added that while he is seeing momentum as an independent news creator, it is also a space that’s been dominated by creators with more conservative ideologies.
“The main hurdle is getting people to support you, which means advertisers and sponsors. And once you have accomplished that I cannot tell you how much weight that takes off of independent journalists and independent media folks, and quite frankly, the folks who are maybe center right, center left, left, or a little bit more progressive don’t get the big advertisers, and they don’t have the cult following as the right,” he said.
Lemon’s shows were previously hosted on Megaphone. Libsyn is also home to shows from Mehdi Hasan, Daniel Tosh, Nick Viall and more.
While live streaming an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis in January for his show, Lemon followed the protesters into the church and was later arrested on federal civil rights charges for interrupting a church service. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges, saying he was doing his job as a journalist. At the moment, Lemon said there has not been any new movement in the case, pointing to a lack of personnel in the Justice Department, which has led to delays.
“There’s no update. It is still going on, and this is the thing that people don’t realize is that this is much bigger than me. This is about the First Amendment of the Constitution. It’s about freedom of the press, and if folks don’t understand how serious that is, then we are lost,” he said.
As for what he thinks of the future of CNN, his former workplace, if Bari Weiss takes over under the merger with Paramount, Lemon said it would “destroy a crown jewel” of the news industry, adding that he believes Weiss is “unqualified” for the job due to her prior experience and what he believes will be a political agenda.
“If Bari Weiss becomes the head of CNN, then it will have an objective. It will have a political objective, an ideological bend, and that’s not what news is about,” Lemon said.
“News is about facts and reality. It’s not about a political ideology,” he continued. “It’s not about moving a network to the right or to the left. It just simply is. And the sooner they realize that, the better off they’ll be.”